What does a desk mean to a writer? For me, it means everything—and, as I learned, its placement can mean the difference between inspiration and inertia.
Two weeks ago I rearranged my writing room by moving my desk away from the window and into a corner. It was meant to be nook-like and create more open space on the floor. Give the room a more minimal feel. Clean up the square footage. Mission: successful.
Then, a problem.
I started writing less. Considerably less. The words dried up. Days passed without a single sentence, an emptiness creeping into a room meant for creation.
Which is unlike me.
Consistency in writing is something I pride myself on. It’s not about penning a magnum opus. It’s about continual practice. To quote Allen Iverson’s famous press conference: “We’re talking about practice. Not a game. Not a game. Not a game. We’re talking about practice.”
And like Iverson, who was lambasted by the media, I wasn’t practicing.1
The shift to a cozy nook felt like progress—until the words stopped coming.
I had unwittingly transformed my writing room into yet another room in the house. A clean room. A cozy room. A peaceful, more open room. One could even say an Instagram-worthy room. Look how minimal it is now.
But a writing room it ceased to be and my desk no longer a designated space where new stories were born. It was now a place where items rested on its surface: a lamp, a framed photo of my wife on our wedding day, a small speaker, and my laptop.
A laptop I was no longer writing on much.
The desk itself is from IKEA: the NORDEN Gateleg table in birch. Granted, it’s not a desk in the traditional sense. Utilitarian is a better descriptor, although it isn’t unattractive. Quite the opposite. Originally designed for everything from dining to sewing, I’ve claimed it for writing. Its collapsible design allows me to shrink it down to 10 1/4 inches for compact spaces or expand upwards from 35 inches to its full form at 60 inches.
Prior to changing up my room, it was set at 35 inches, positioned directly in front of the window overlooking my backyard. In the nook, it remained at 35 inches. Yet somehow, the desk now felt smaller. Less approachable. Confined.
I don’t resign myself to one specific location when I write. I write sitting down on the couch in the living room. When my lower back is shooting me up with pain, I write standing up at an old cargo dresser that’s the perfect height. I write laying down in bed with a pillow in my lap and my back against the headboard.
I write in all these places and in every one of these positions.
And while every word I write isn’t composed at my desk, they almost always start and end seated at my desk.
In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, the renowned novelist Stephen King gives the following advice:
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room.
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
King isn’t alone in this thinking. As PEN/Faulkner fiction award winner E.L. Doctorow once said of his set-up: “I sit at a desk. I face the wall. If you sit facing the wall, the only way out is through the sentences.”
Sitting in a corner and facing a wall may be the preferred placement of a desk for King and Doctorow, but for me, it’s not a way out. This placement is an obstruction to creativity at best and a dead end where ideas stop flowing freely at worst.
I need to see life happening to feel connected to my work. My desk may still butt up against the corner of the room, but it must begin where my laptop is positioned: in front of the window to the outside world where I can see birds dropping in at my feeder.
Where I can watch the squirrels scurry about.
View the deer pass silently by my back fence to munch on leaves.
Where, on rare days, I may spy a fox slinking through the woods or a raccoon decked out in its bandit mask.
Call this what you will: a distraction, perhaps. I see it differently: as inspiration. As life happening before my eyes.
“Life isn’t a support system for art,” King says. “It’s the other way around.”
I would posit two things can be true at once: that while art may be the real support system for life, life, too, acts as a support system for art.
The purpose and placement of a desk is deeply personal. Individual in its preference. For some, it may belong in the corner, the wall a barrier against the world’s noise. For me, it belongs by the window welcoming the outside world in.
I need to see life taking place outdoors to ignite the art within me. Throughout the day, I may move around as I write. But my window, and the nature outside its pane, is a key element. It is the key itself I place in the ignition to get the car warmed up.
Which is why I have rearranged my room again, moving my desk back to where it was.
Away from the cozy nook.
No longer staring at a wall.
I’ve even expanded the desk to its full size of 60 inches. That way I can scatter my notes, drawings, and reference material across its surface to the right of me.
Because the purpose of a desk isn’t to be a tidy piece of furniture in an even tidier room. It’s meant to be a little messy, maybe a lot messy. Functional. Alive. Its placement conducive to the task.
If not, my writing room is no longer a writing room. It is but another room in the house and that’s not what this room is for.
I thought moving my desk would simplify my writing space, but I learned that simplicity doesn’t always serve creativity. It can do the opposite.
What’s a space in your house that is uniquely you and how do you have it laid out? It could be another living area, the kitchen where you cook up your concoctions through recipes, or like me, a space dedicated solely for creativity. If you have a blog, write a response to this post or share your ideas on social media.
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Footnotes
- What the media didn’t include in their write-ups of the incident was that the murder trial for the man who killed Iverson’s best friend, Rahsaan Langeford, had begun only days before. Iverson has since admitted he wasn’t in the greatest headspace during this time. Regardless, the sports media, for anyone who remembers this moment in NBA history, ate Iverson alive for the press conference. It was a quote that would follow him throughout his career and even past retirement into the NBA Hall of Fame.